There are many application in science, industry, military, and other fields, including driving large lasers, pulsed radar systems and various sources of electromagnetic radiation, where requirements exists for a power supply capable of producing pulses in the kilovolt and kiloamp range at high pulse repetition rates, for example 10 to 100 pulses per second (pps) with fast rise times in the microsecond range. While spark gap driven drivers have in the past been used in some such applications, such drivers are not capable of sustained operation at repetition rates of hundreds of pulses per second and, being spark gap devices, have relatively short lifetimes, requiring frequent servicing. Such devices are therefore not suitable for many applications in for example industry where millions of pulses may be generated in a single day and months, or even years, of service free operation are desired.
One way to achieve more reliable operation is to utilize an all solid state driver. However, it has not heretofore been possible to directly obtain the high rates of current rise required for such a power supply directly from solid state switches, and it has therefore been necessary to employ such solid state switching to discharge an energy storage capacitor through solid state switches at a slower rate consistent with the capacity of such switches and to then compress the pulse using for example non-linear magnetic or non-linear capacitive compression to obtain the desired fast rise times. However, such compression techniques are costly and bulky because the discharge energy must be stored within each stage of the pulse compression apparatus. A need therefore exists for an improved solid state pulsed power supply which is capable of providing kilovolt and kiloamp pulses at high repetition rates with fast pulse rise times on the order of kiloamps/microsecond, and, which power supply is capable of generating large numbers of pulses, in excess of 10.sup.7 and preferably substantially higher, without requiring servicing.